PUBLIC LIVES; A Return to Indian Origins, With a Flair for Design

By ROBIN FINN

Published: August 25, 2006

CORRECTION APPENDED

RIGHT off the bat, Duane Blue Spruce, a native New Yorker whose arboreal -- not surreal -- surname is legit Laguna/San Juan Pueblo Indian and whose workplace is the National Museum of the American Indian, confesses to a special fondness for a defunct advertisement for Jewish rye bread. Yes, there's a catch. Then again, odd disclosures may be the norm for a mellow fellow who conducts video conference calls with colleagues at the National Museum of the American Indian on the National Mall, where he served as architectural liaison and project coordinator in 2004, while wearing a souvenir green-foam Statue of Liberty crown. He's into visuals.

Mr. Blue Spruce, an architect with a degree from Syracuse University, remembers noticing the bread ad in the subway during his commute to high school on the Upper East Side from his family's apartment on the north side of Staten Island. Now an image of the same ad torn from a magazine is tacked with other oldies (like a 1951 shot of the Yankees pitcher Allie Reynolds, part Muscogee-Creek Indian) on the wall behind his desk in the landmark United States Custom House. Interesting collection. As collated by Mr. Blue Spruce, it has become a museum-quality assemblage.

''You Don't Have to Be Jewish to Love Levy's'' is the advertising pitch on the photo, but it is the model, not the message, that captivates Mr. Blue Spruce, 45, the facilities planning coordinator at this Smithsonian-run museum, known as the George Gustav Hey Center, where the $5 million Diker Pavilion for Native Arts and Cultures, an exhibition and performance space, will open on Sept. 23. The museum is in the Custom House.

He is still shaky after the precarious unloading and installation this week of 10 display cases for the 77 artifacts of ''Beauty Surrounds Us,'' Diker's inaugural exhibit: ''Native people aren't as visible a group as some others in the city, and when you read the history books, there's a Native side that doesn't get equal time,'' he says, betraying his serious side. ''One of the main points we're trying to convey at the museum is that Native people are people of the present and should be recognized as contributing members of contemporary society. The misconceptions that are still out there about what an Indian is supposed to be, or look like, are incredibly offensive.''

BESIDES monitoring the final architectural touches to the elliptical 6,000-foot space, Mr. Blue Spruce is editing two books on the urban American Indian experience as companion pieces to the Diker unveiling. Hence his interest in the guy munching the rye bread.

The model in the photograph, from 1967, is a middle-aged male Indian, presumably a Navajo, wearing a broad-brimmed cowboy hat and pigtails. Mr. Blue Spruce, through some detective work, found out that the anonymous man in the ad was an engineer for the New York Central Railroad, ''discovered'' on the sidewalk by an ad agency scout. Now the man will be immortalized again, this time in ''Mother Earth, Father Skyline: The Native American Experience in New York City.'' Mr. Blue Spruce, whose other book, ''Concrete Tipi,'' offers a collection of 20 postcards, has not given up on identifying the American Indian in the Levy's ad. Though Mr. Blue Spruce fears he may not still be alive.

Then again, chasing his heritage has become something of a leitmotif for Mr. Blue Spruce, whose only sartorial nod to his American Indian roots is an ornate turquoise, coral and silver Zuni watchband. Otherwise, he's a generic chinos type who speaks not a word of Pueblo dialect. By the time he was old enough to talk, the entire paternal side of his family tree was lost to him.

After his parents divorced when he was 5, his father, a dentist with the United States Public Health Service, left Staten Island to return to the Southwest, severing ties with his three children. Mr. Blue Spruce and two older sisters were raised by a single mom.

Sure, he knew his absent father, George Blue Spruce Jr., is presumed to be this country's first Pueblo dentist, and knew his grandfather, George Blue Spruce Sr., had taught woodworking at the Santa Fe Indian School in New Mexico and hoped for an architect in the family. But in 1966, Mr. Blue Spruce was left with only his last name to connect him to his origins. Otherwise, he says, he was disconnected. For 22 years. His sisters, spurred by a 100-year celebration at the Indian school, reconciled with their father, so he tried it, too. It was emotional, not bitter.

''It sort of completed my own personal picture of who I was and what it meant to be Pueblo, but it's my professional life that sort of led me back to my culture,'' he says.

After college, he returned to New York City and a series of internships at architectural firms. When he heard that the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe was looking for an assistant project manager, ideally an American Indian, he applied and got the job. He worked there from 1991 to 1993 before joining the Smithsonian in 1994.

Going to Santa Fe and reconnecting with his Pueblo roots and relatives was a positive homecoming; returning to New York (he lives in Astoria, Queens, with his wife, Ida, an artist, and their two children) was another. The Custom House has fascinated him ever since he passed it on his high school commutes. Then it was empty, elegant and desolate. Not now. He is already, he says, working on a major exhibition for 2009.

Correction: September 1, 2006, Friday
The Public Lives column last Friday, about Duane Blue Spruce, the facilities planning coordinator for the Smithsonian-run Indian museum at the United States Custom House in Manhattan, misspelled part of the museum's name. It is the George Gustav Heye -- not Hey -- Center.